2
fathers' sayings, but like having thought of them so well that they say them again:
"Good fences make good neighbors." Spring is the mischief in their professors, who
want to put an idea in their heads: "Why do they make good neighbors?" But a certain
type of professor, often oxymoronically styled "Post-Modernist," wants to go further: to
question not only why they make good neighbors or even whether they make good
neighbors (which might be a question worth asking), but whether they are not such
arbitrary social constructs that the very ability to distinguish one neighbor from
another, or a good one from a bad, breaks down completely. Something there is that
doesn't love a wall. But this gives their more traditional colleagues pause. For they fear
that, when all fences have been knocked down thus, civilization will have been
destroyed, and the Goths and Vandals will come again.
Labels are convenient but problematic, a mixed good or a necessary evil. By
"Post-Modernist" here I do not mean all people who have adopted that label or had it
applied to them. I am not defending Modernism, nor implying that having gotten
beyond it is necessarily bad. Christians were pointing out the limitations of the
Modernist Project (the attempt, since the "Enlightenment," to subsume all reality and all
knowledge under the rubric of rationalistic scientific objectivity) long before it was
fashionable to do so. But they did not do so by throwing the rational baby out with the
rationalist bath water. If we are going to leave one error behind, it behooves us not to
exchange it for a worse.
Post-Modernism, as I shall use the term here, then, means precisely that style of
disillusionment with Modernity which is too sophisticated to be able to make any clear
distinction between babies and bath water because it rejects all distinctions as arbitrary
impositions upon a reality too complex to be categorized. Angry at itself for having
trusted in Scientific Rationality's promise to deliver absolute truth with absolute
objectivity, it now cynically rejects all truth claims as equally empty promises. Once
burned and twice shy, it starts from the conviction that anyone peddling truth claims is
selling snake oil. Believing that truth is an illusion, it sees all attempts at analysis or
even definition as thin disguises for the imposition of power. Therefore it manifests
itself in literary study that ignores (or "deconstructs") traditional issues of meaning or